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This week Financial News released its FN 40 Under 40 list of the investment banking industry's rising stars. Here we profile the advisory bankers who made the cut.

Rosie Bailey
Executive director, UK investment banking
Morgan Stanley
Age 33
Bailey joined Lazard after graduating from Oxford University in 2000, moving to Morgan Stanley in 2006 where she now works in the UK investment banking team. Described as “a class act” by market participants, she has worked on a number of transactions in the exchange space, advising the London Stock Exchange on its $705m acquisition of the remaining 50% stake in indices provider FTSE, and US commodities exchange IntercontinentalExchange on the $602m acquisition of the Climate Exchange. Other deal highlights include advising on the $811m sale of shoe designer Jimmy Choo to Labelux Group and Terra Firma’s $438m bid for Garden Centre Group. She is currently on maternity leave and is due to return to work in January.

Jonathan Bathard-Smith
Managing director, corporate broking
Barclays
Age 37
When Barclays made the decision to build a corporate broking business from scratch, Bathard-Smith was a natural fit. Six years earlier, he’d been part of a group to join Morgan Stanley from Merrill Lynch, where under senior colleagues Paul Baker and Alisdair Gayne he helped found the corporate broking team. Since his appointment as a founding member of Barclays’ corporate broking team alongside Gayne and Jim Renwick, who joined from UBS, Barclays has assembled more than 20 corporate broking clients, including 10 in the FTSE 100. Earlier this year, Bathard-Smith worked on the $436m sale of UK aerospace equipment company Umeco to Cytec Industries of the US.

Laurent Benshimon
Head of financial restructuring team, Paris
Houlihan Lokey
Age 38
Benshimon graduated from ESCP-EAP European School of Management and then spent three years working at Salomon Smith Barney/Citigroup, focusing on mergers and acquisitions and capital raising in Europe before joining Houlihan Lokey in 2003. He has worked on some of the highest-profile corporate restructurings in France this year, including the $4.6bn debt restructuring of the world’s third-largest container shipping group CMA CGM; the €415m restructuring of chemical manufacturer Novasep; and the €411m restructuring of Orco Property Group’s debt. He has also previously worked on deals including Euro Disney and Eurotunnel and private equity-backed companies including Frans Bonhomme, Deutsch Group and Monier Group.

Jakub Brogowski
Director, oil and gas investment banking
RBC Capital Markets
Age 33
Having graduated from University of Calgary in 2002, Brogowski flirted with the idea of moving to London after an extended stay in the UK while travelling. Instead, he returned to Calgary and got a job with TD Securities. Working with Robert Mason, head of oil sands investment banking at the Canadian firm, he focused on companies extracting resources from unconventional sources, before moving to the UK in 2010 when the bank established an energy and power team in London. Last year, he moved to RBC, working under Tim Chapman, head of international oil and gas, and has been described by a senior colleague as “a superstar”.

Ben Catt
Managing director, utilities and infrastructure corporate advisory
Evercore
Age 32
Catt, who turns 32 today, is the youngest managing director in Evercore’s London office. He started his career at Rothschild, spending two years in the mergers and acquisitions team, before moving to Lexicon in 2004, rising to the rank of partner and director at the time of its acquisition by Evercore last year. A utilities and infrastructure specialist, Catt worked on pre-crisis deals to acquire UK-regulated water and sewage businesses Kelda and AWG, and the 2010 acquisition of UK high-speed rail line High Speed 1 by Canada-based pension funds Borealis Infrastructure and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan in a $3.4bn deal.

Glen Cronin
Managing director, restructuring
Rothschild
Age 34
Cronin started his career at Schroders in Paris, later moving to Close Brothers and then Rothschild in 2007, where he was named a managing director this June. He is currently advising the noteholders of Punch Tavern’s £2.8bn securitisation, and earlier this year was a senior member of the team that advised junior lenders on the $1bn restructuring of German plastics company Klöckner Pentaplast, a rare example of junior creditors refinancing the senior lenders to secure control. He has also worked on landmark transactions including the restructuring of Findus, and advised mezzanine lenders of Gala Coral on its restructuring. He hopes to find some time over Christmas to read Bradley Wiggins’ autobiography.

Omar Davis
Head of metals and mining for Emea and emerging markets
ex-Asia
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Age 34
Davis started running metals and mining for emerging markets ex-Asia last year, taking on the Emea region in January, and now has responsibility for a region that spans from Russia to Latin America, and Africa to western Europe. BofA Merrill Lynch has been making strides in the sector in recent years, working on the flotation of Rusal in 2010 and Glencore in 2011. The bank was sole adviser on Glencore’s $1bn acquisition of Optimum Coal, and was named as one of two advisers to Glencore on its $7.6bn acquisition of Viterra. According to Morningstar, BofA Merrill Lynch is also corporate broker to nine FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 metals and mining companies – an increasingly lucrative sector.

Simon Granger
Senior managing director
FTI Consulting
Age 37
Granger left Deloitte in 2007 to launch FTI Consulting’s restructuring practice, alongside three former partners from Ernst & Young. A licensed insolvency practitioner, he last year advised the lenders of Irish conglomerate Quinn Group on the complex restructuring of €1.3bn of debt, and worked on the restructuring of Italian telephone directories business Seat Pagine Gialle, which completed in September. He is currently working on the operational restructuring of a renewable energy company in peripheral Europe and is charged with expanding FTI Consulting’s corporate finance business into new territories.

Alex Grant
Managing director in energy investment banking group
Jefferies
Age 34
Growing up, Grant aspired to “improve oil recovery rates in fractured carbonates”, but he instead became an energy banker. Recruited from ABN Amro in 2005, with previous experience in JP Morgan’s energy and power M&A team, Grant last year advised Statoil on the $3.1bn sale of a 40% interest in its Peregrino field to Sinochem, and advised Nuon on the sale of its Dutch upstream business to Tullow for €300m. He is also working on the sale of BP’s interests in several of North Sea oil and gas fields to Abu Dhabi energy company Taqa, a deal which could rise to $1.3bn in value. With two children under the age of two, Grant says his free time is “spent sleeping or thinking about sleeping”.

Alex Ham
Co-head of corporate broking
Numis
Age 30
“You have no idea how young he is when you speak to him on the phone. He sounds like he is in his 40s,” said one rival banker of Ham. Ham joined Numis fresh from university in 2005, where he had been talent-spotted by then chairman of Numis Michael Spencer, who introduced him to Lorna Tilbian, executive director and head of Numis’s media research team. Ham has now built experience advising a wide range of clients, including Punch Taverns founder Hugh Osmond’s cash shell Horizon, gaming company Betfair, retailers Ocado and Asos, and dating company Cupid.

Jaber George Jabbour
Founder
Ethos Capital Advisors
Age 30

Jabbour, who speaks Arabic, English and French, moved to the UK from Syria in 2004, taking a place at Imperial College, from which he graduated with an MSc in finance with the best overall performance on the course.
A stint at Houlihan Lokey followed, where he helped Iraq restructure its debt after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. He then moved into fixed income at Goldman Sachs, where he generated trade ideas and structured financial products, solutions and derivative strategies for institutional investors.
In 2009, he founded Ethos, advising finance ministries, debt management offices and other public entities how to restructure their swaps and derivatives portfolios. The firm is also working with law firm Hausfeld, which is pursuing a class action lawsuit related to the manipulation of Libor, to assist investors in recovering losses related to the case and the misselling of derivatives and structured products.

Nicholas Harper
Managing director, UK investment banking
Goldman Sachs
Age 37
Harper has had a hand in many of the big UK deals of recent years, including advising gaming business Rank Group, retail conglomerate Boparan Holdings, internet betting exchange Betfair, power firm GDF Suez and pharmacy giant Alliance Boots. He joined the US bank in 2000 as an associate from Schroders, became vice-president three years later and made managing director in 2008. Harper’s mentors include Goldman Sachs banker Karen Cook, former Goldman rainmaker Simon Dingemans, now chief financial officer at GlaxoSmithKline, and Nick Reid, a senior UK banker who joined UBS in 2006.

Richard Hoyle
Managing director
Greenhill
Age 36
Hoyle moved to Greenhill in 2000, shortly after the firm’s London office opened, and has since widened his experience, particularly in the telecoms, media and technology sector. This year he worked on the $4.9bn sale of UK marketing communications group Aegis to Dentsu of Japan, which is due to complete in a few weeks, and last year he worked on the $859m sale of market research company Synovate to Ipsos. Tom Drury, the former chief executive of waste management company Shanks, said Hoyle had “a rare combination of very personable client-centric skills alongside an ability to tell it as it is”.

Dominic Lee
Managing director, industrials
Goldman Sachs
Age 38
Just days after Goldman Sachs announced its new batch of partners in November, talk turned to those who would become partner in 2014 – and Lee is a strong candidate. Responsible for Goldman’s relationships with UK mid-cap industrial clients, he has been heavily influenced by Goldman Sachs’s European president Karen Cook, and has worked alongside other Goldman heavyweights such as Anthony Gutman and Simon Dingemans. Lee joined the US bank from Schroders in 2000, and was promoted to managing director in 2009. He has advised on a number of large transactions, including Cadbury’s takeover by Kraft last year. He also worked with BAE on this summer’s politically thwarted super-merger with EADS.

Linos Lekkas
Head of corporate and investment banking for Central Europe, Greece, Israel and Poland
Citigroup
Age 38

Lekkas grew up in London and Greece and completed his undergraduate degree in business economics at Queen Mary, University of London before receiving an MPhil in finance from the University of Cambridge. While his peers were applying for jobs in investment banking, he returned to Greece to do military service having secured a deferred place on the graduate scheme at Barclays de Zoete Wedd, joining two months before it was acquired by Credit Suisse First Boston. Lekkas rose through the ranks at Credit Suisse, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Citigroup as a protégé of Christos Megalou, Andrea Orcel and Manolo Falcó.
He joined Citigroup in January 2011, originally responsible for corporate and investment banking in Greece and Cyprus, but in April this year he was promoted to head up a London hub for the coverage of central Europe, Poland and Israel. He now manages 80 people. Citi ranks fifth in Dealogic’s league table for CEE investment banking revenues for this year, up from 12th last year.
Lekkas has a fascination with modern history and politics and enjoys the escapism of the silver screen during his free time. He says he will spend his retirement at his summer house on the Greek island of Tinos.

Christian Lesueur
Head of telecoms, media and technology investment banking
UBS
Age 37
Lesueur became a managing director at the tender age of 32 and was promoted to head of the 20-plus-strong TMT team a year later. This year he worked on private equity firm CVC Capital Partners’ sale of a 28% stake in Formula 1 for $2.1bn. The high-profile deal was done in January but the details were kept confidential until April. Lesueur has advised on more than $250bn of M&A and about $30bn of equity issuance in the TMT sector for big-name clients including Vodafone and BSkyB. The son of a zookeeper, Lesueur has had a truly international upbringing – the French-Danish banker grew up in Greece, studied at Yale in the US and has lived in London for 14 years.

Simon Lyons
Managing director, M&A
UBS
Age 34
Lyons joined UBS after graduating, before moving to Tricorn Partners in 2003, where he spent three and a half years. He rejoined UBS in the M&A team in 2007. In 2010, he worked on the sale of a controlling interest in RBS WorldPay, the UK bank’s global merchant services business, to a private equity consortium for an enterprise value of £2bn. More recently, he worked on the flotation of insurer Direct Line, which raised $1.5bn in October, and outside the financial institution sector has been advising Barrick Gold over its talks with China Gold.

Charles Noel-Johnson
Managing director
Moelis & Company
Age 36

As a child, Noel-Johnson wanted to fight crime like Batman but, instead of donning a cape in Gotham City, he began his career at JP Morgan's asset management business. He went on to build the corporate restructuring group at Close Brothers over eight years from 2001. He was approached by Ken Moelis in 2009 to set up a restructuring practice, bringing a 10-strong team from Close Brothers with him.
Noel-Johnson secured Moelis a mandate to advise the government of Dubai on the Dubai World restructuring and debt crisis, which led to the firm opening a Dubai office with a team of 10. After relocating to London this year, he continues to split his time between the Middle East and the UK. This year he has advised bondholders in the €2.7bn debt restructuring for Italian directories publisher Seat Pagine Gialle.
Apart from convincing his wife to marry him, Noel-Johnson says his proudest achievement is building out the Moelis business in a short space of time. He spends his free time scuba diving in the Caribbean and Asia as well as playing football and plans to retire on a farm in the countryside. He is currently reading To Kill a Mockingbird.

Neil Passmore
Executive director
JP Morgan
Age 37
Passmore, an executive director in the bank’s UK natural resources investment banking team, joined JP Morgan in 2004. He has worked on deals including the $2.1bn flotation of Vallares, an investment vehicle formed by former BP chief executive Tony Hayward, in June 2011 and a $4.2bn merger with Genel Energy in November 2011, the culmination of four years of travelling to Iraq and Kurdistan. He is part of the team working with Xstrata on its $70bn merger with Glencore, the largest announced metals and mining M&A deal on record. Before his career in banking, Passmore served as an officer in the Army Air Corps and was decorated for gallantry in Iraq in 2003, where he served as a front-line attack helicopter pilot.

David Plowman
Co-head of European consumer products investment banking
Citigroup
Age 38
Plowman was joined at Citigroup this year by his identical twin Robert. The brothers run the consumer products team, although they are rarely in the office at the same time. A noteworthy transaction this year for David Plowman was the Heineken acquisition of Asia Pacific Breweries that was temporarily stalled by Thai billionaire investor Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi. Plowman has also worked on other contested transactions, such as Spanish infrastructure firm Ferrovial’s acquisition of airport company BAA and Dubai Ports’ takeover of P&O. He started his career at Schroders and is bracing himself for fatherhood this month.

Rosenfield swapped the public sector for the private in 2011, having spent the previous three and a half year as principal private secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, working alongside Alistair Darling and later George Osborne during the financial crisis and the fiscal consolidation programme that followed. He joined Bank of America Merrill Lynch last year, spending time in the M&A team and briefing institutional investors on UK and European macro issues, before settling down to life in the UK investment banking team. Now a senior relationship manager to a handful of FTSE 100 corporates, he also works to ensure the bank is plugged in with government, although he says his former colleagues have a "glint in their eye" when they see him now, and wonder what he is going to pitch for.
A father of three, he recently hosted his daughter's birthday party for more than 40 children, and cites trips to the opera and cinema with his wife as an important means of "reminding ourselves we're human".

Chris Seherr-Thoss
Director in natural resources
Lazard
Age 36
Seherr-Thoss spent eight years at mining giant Anglo American in a range of roles, which included investor relations and business development, before joining Lazard in 2007 following the completion of an MBA at the London Business School. He now works closely with Spiro Youakim, the well-regarded metals and mining specialist who joined the independent adviser in 2008 from Citigroup. Recent deal experience includes the $2.3bn sale of European Goldfields to Eldorado Gold, which completed earlier this year. He has previously advised TanzaniteOne on its defence against Gemfield Resources, and Vedanta Resources on its acquisition of Anglo American’s zinc assets.